ObliGuard — Document Compliance Intelligence

Inspiration

Important requirements are often buried inside long notices, tenders, circulars, and scholarship documents. Missing a single requirement or deadline can make an otherwise eligible application incomplete.

We wanted to build a system that turns these lengthy documents into something actionable: what needs to be submitted, what is mandatory, when it is due, and whether the available evidence satisfies the requirement.

What it does

A user can upload a document and view the extracted obligations and compliance information through a simple dashboard. The current implementation includes:

Document upload and backend processing Obligation extraction and structured storage Mandatory/optional requirement identification Deadline tracking Compliance status Readiness scoring Timeline information Frontend dashboard for viewing the results

Our planned architecture also includes an AI service for deeper document understanding, extraction, and evidence matching. The AI-service integration is the remaining component of the current prototype.

How we built it

The application uses a React frontend connected to a Node.js/Express backend with MongoDB for storing document and obligation data.

The backend exposes APIs for document processing and compliance-related operations. The frontend consumes these APIs and presents the results in a dashboard so that users can move from a long document to a structured checklist of actionable requirements.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was designing the backend workflow so that extracted obligations could be represented consistently and then used by multiple modules such as compliance checking, readiness scoring, and timeline generation.

Integrating all the components within a limited hackathon timeline was another challenge. We prioritized getting a working end-to-end foundation in place first, while keeping the architecture ready for the AI integration in the next iteration.

What we learned

Building this project helped us understand how a seemingly simple document-processing problem becomes a multi-stage engineering workflow:

Document → Processing → Structured Obligations → Compliance Analysis → Readiness → Actionable Timeline

We also learned how important it is to define clear interfaces between the frontend, backend, database, and AI components so that each part of the system can be developed independently.

What's next for ObliGuard — Document Compliance Intelligence

The next step is to integrate the AI service for automated extraction and evidence matching, allowing the system to handle more complex real-world documents with less manual processing.

Our goal is to make compliance less about searching through pages of text and more about having a clear, actionable checklist of what is required, what is missing, and what needs attention next.